This blog is a response to the SNP not making public all of the submissions it received to its (FIRST! in 2010) consultation on an independence referendum. The second earliest post here is a submission Salmond dug in not to make public. Why? Hiding which of its contents? Is it because they want to run away from acknowledging the court change? Is it because they want to avoid taking account of the issue of return of the diaspora and how some returners to Scotland have been treated by the state?

Wednesday, 4 February 2015

Labour has it right

None of you riding on the nationalist fire stoked by the Tory press are going to get any goodies from it, when you find you have let the Tories back in. It's in their clear electoral interest to feed all this poll frenzy against Labour.

What could be better than the version of the Vow including benefits devolution which Jim Murphy and Gordon Brown have arrived at for Labour? It has something for everyone. It addresses any conern there was with Smith about whether enough of welfare was being devolved. It deserves to be popular.

It's not a contradiction of Labour's previous line at all, the way the already hostile letter writers are painting. Labour was against separating the welfare budget from the union, it was against budgetary separation, fiscal independence, which would carry all the same economic vulnerabilities for Scotland as actually indy. It still is. Labour's policy is still keeping the British welfare budget united. So it remains backed up by the union. At the same time as doing that, they have found a way to save us from it meaning that welfare rates and terms will all be in British Tory governments' power to determine. We will get a Scottish power to top them up. To do our own thing, not from a position of budgetary separation, but as a top-up. Extra measures of our own that we can do on top of still having most of it delivered by the union.

This is a clever piece of common sense. Vote for it. You have no sensible reason not to. You won't have to choose between keeping the welfare system's united economic security or about having a Scottish power to be more generous with it than the Tories. Whichever of those you care most about, whichever side you are on of the debate between them, does not matter, because you will get them both!!!!!!!!!!!!

YOU WILL GET THEM BOTH!!! IT'S BRILLIANT.

There was nothing in the cross-party Vow that vowed this, but it was in Gordon Brown's Labour picture of what the Vow should be, in the final phase of the referendum. And yes Labour is delivering his picture. The best of all worlds for folks on both sides!! So vote for it. Stop being part of this irrational poll flip against Labour that should have happened in the New Labour period in the noughties, not now.